Blame and recriminations were flying around today at the Senate committee’s inquiry into the ABS’s attempt at a “digital first”, online Australian census. Appearing before the committee, ABS still held IBM responsible for the outage that resulted in the online census being unavailable for 40 hours. Although...

Rails encourages developers to use a database in integrated acceptance tests, and we’ve gone with the flow on that front.

However, like many rails apps we also integrate with a number of external services that are more difficult to deal with in tests - stripe, campaign monitor, akismet and slack are good examples. In most cases these services...

Just how democratic is the election for an American president?

You might think that the person who receives the most votes wins, right?

Wrong.

Just ask Al Gore, who in 2000 won more than half-a-million votes more than the “winner”, George W. Bush.

In fact, on four occasions in American history (1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000),...